The Communist's Daughter

by Dennis Bock

  Two weeks later, in London, she called for me at the club at half past three on the Saturday as planned. I was pleased and full of expectation. We enjoyed a short stroll around Green Park. My leg not yet entirely healed, I still walked with a limp and a cane. I wore my wound stripe, as I was obliged to do. Civilians nodded with grave admiration when they saw me. After an hour I took no more notice.

  We hired a horse cab and rode between neighbourhoods. It was a wonderful escape from the hospital. We saw signs of the war—a bombed building from one of the German zeppelin raids, torn up cobble. Uniformed men were everywhere. When my eyes met another soldier’s, one of us would always turn away too quickly. Was my discomfort as clear to him as his was to me? The outside world was a pleasant reminder of another life. We would remain there as long as possible. I had heard the stories of men from the Field Hospital vomiting or turning violent at the scent of a lady’s perfume after months of living in the stench of blood and sewage, knocking down a well-heeled gentleman for spouting off about the war. But I felt nothing as desperate as this, only the sadness of my loss and the sharp grinding in my damaged leg.

  We took a second cab to Great Russell Street and walked slowly through the museum. We stopped often to sit as my leg could carry me only a quarter of an hour at a stretch. We passed from room to room. It was lovely to leave our century, and humbling to know these great civilizations were gone—that the eyes and hands and minds were dead, and their secrets along with them.

  Agnes pointed out Nephthys for me. She was drawn into a stone tablet, surrounded by lifeless bodies.

  Agnes said, “You know, I don’t feel right about what I said, it just seemed tasteless and insensitive, among all those injured men. I say things like that, stupid things. I feel quite ashamed of myself.”

  “If that’s the worst of your sins you’ll be okay.”

  Later in the afternoon, we walked over to Tottenham Court Road, where we decided to drink a pint of beer and found a dim pub. Its hard planks creaked as we walked across the floor. Weary and worn, the place smelled of old men with a faint whiff of lavatory. We took a table. A group sat at the bar drinking, exchanging sudden rough exclamations between their long silences. These usually had something to do with the war. The devils, one man said. Godless heathens. The usual sort of cursing, I will spare you. I drank two pints to the half Agnes drank. I wanted a third and was ready to ask for it but I sensed she wanted to leave. One of the men in particular was getting agitated. He said there was a wickedness attacking the heart of the British Army, a moral degeneracy that threatened to undermine morale. The pacifists and the homosexuals were proof enough that an invasion of home soil had begun and it went as high as the Foreign Office. One of the Kaiser’s plots as sure as the Hun’s a devil in uniform, he said. But on this subject the others were mute. He seemed a man they didn’t want to bother with.

  Just as I was thinking this, one of his colleagues, a large fellow, said, “Now, William, drink up and go home. Better yet, go home straight away. You shouldn’t need reminding it’s our boys dying for us over there.” He placed his pint glass, emptied, on the bar before him.

  William sipped his bitter, apparently debating his position. He finally said, “You shut your hole, I’ll speak my mind if I care to.”

  “All right, William, all right.”

  “You’ll not talk down to me.” He shoved away his pint.

  “You’d best be going home now,” the bigger man said. “Or why don’t you go off to war, brave William, and show us the man you are.” The others, their heads hung low till now, looked up and smiled.

  William glowered at him but held his tongue. He seemed to realize the man he was provoking was a good head taller and fifty pounds heavier, for he said nothing. Likely he knew he’d been made a fool of, and his only hope was to formulate some way of saving face. A sour black fog had enveloped him. I sat back in my chair waiting for a second round of insults and taunts, then looked over at Agnes. She was gazing out the small window, focused on something far off. William held himself stock-still. He didn’t say anything more, simply stared at the other man.

  “I’d like to leave now,” Agnes said.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll go.”

  We hired a cab over to Victoria Station and waited for the Liverpool train, due to depart just after six o’clock. We watched the pigeons and the lottery sellers and the uniformed men.

  “He was a drunken fool.”

  “Yes, he was,” I said.

  My leg had begun to hurt and I wanted another drink. I knew the leg would feel wooden in the morning. I was glad she was leaving. The excitement of being with her was gone. I had nothing to say and felt drained. I wanted to be alone. I walked her to her platform, where we shook hands and I helped her board the train. Then I walked back to the club.

  I have thought about that day off and on over the years, and what strikes me most, I think, is the profound sadness I felt when I understood that this kindly girl could do nothing for me, despite her goodness and patience, and knew for the first time that something in my heart had been changed forever.

  Envelope Three

  Another lovely day. It has been a fine autumn here in Shansi, the air crisp and clean. Almost a month has passed since I wrote last. Please forgive me. I might say the war has detained me, which is true enough. I might plead exhaustion, which also is true. Conditions here provide few natural breaks for a man intent on looking back on his life thoroughly, as this letter is prompting me to do. Yet I will admit now that time, or its lack, is only half the problem.

  The story itself, I suppose, is the other half. We’ve now come upon a difficult chapter in my life, and I have been hoping to avoid it. I have been circling, let’s say, gathering strength. Bravery I seem to possess in abundance. Courage is something quite different.

  Where, then, to begin?

  The Bentley Park Hotel in December of last year.

  My stay in New York coincided with some journalism that had brought Frank Pitcairn from England to New York City. I had recently finished touring with the documentary film on the unit, leaving it up in Montreal before coming down to New York to prepare for this China expedition. I tracked him down at the Bentley, wanting to thank him for the piece he’d written for the Daily Worker. I also wanted to take the opportunity to invite him to write a piece on our coming adventure. It was to that end that I would offer to buy him dinner and fill him with drinks and details about the cause in China. When I finally got hold of him, though, he seemed distracted. It had been months since we’d spoken. He was evasive for no reason I could understand and told me his stay in the city would be short. This was not a good time, he said. He’d already overextended himself and was working under a deadline. Yet I persisted. At length I was able to pin him down for later that night, promising a casual bite and drink, an hour or two at most.

  I then proceeded by subway to the offices of the China Aid Council in the Bowery where I met with the two other members of the expedition—a Dr. Charles H. Parsons and Miss Jean Ewen, an excellent nurse, I had heard, and fluent in Chinese, who had served in Shantung for two years before the Japanese invasion began. Our meeting lasted three hours, focusing on the many details yet to be seen to. It was an optimistic meeting, I recall. I spoke of the importance of this mission, as a good unto itself and as the first wave of the internationalism we’d seen in Spain. We would be the first of many hundreds of medical teams to go over, providing the necessary inspiration. We will put China on the map over here, I said. This war will not go unaided.

  Just before nine o’clock, after the meeting was dissolved, I found a telephone and dialled Pitcairn’s hotel. I asked the clerk at the desk to put me through to his room, but he didn’t pick up his telephone. I wrote him a note explaining the nature of the China expedition, our itinerary, departure times, members’ names, et cetera, hoping he might present this to the edito
rs of his newspaper back in London, then jumped in a cab to the Bentley. I planned to leave the note at the front desk, but I saw Pitcairn sitting in the hotel bar, hidden away in a dark corner. His face registered surprise.

  I said, “I’d have mistaken you for some sort of spy, sitting over here in the shadows.”

  “Jesus Christ, old man,” he said, standing up. He hesitated in offering his hand, and anyone watching might have thought I’d stolen his wife. “It’s good to see you,” he said, and in a moment he reassembled himself, but only just. It was as if he was unsure of me.

  “Got you at a bad moment?” I said.

  “Sit,” he said. “Not at all.”

  *

  The following Tuesday I boarded a train with Jean Ewen and Charles Parsons, bound for Seattle. From there we would cross the border up to Vancouver, where we’d depart for Hong Kong on a steamer. Charles chatted away with the other drinkers in the bar car and Jean managed to busy herself reading. I’d brought along a journalist’s account of life with the Chinese Communists called China’s Red Army Marches but found it difficult going. So distracted that concentration was very near impossible, I instead ended up watching a good bit of Indiana and Illinois roll past my window.

  Three days later we arrived in Vancouver, a city hunched and brooding under a gloomy January rain. Like a vain woman, I remember thinking, it was as blessed by its natural wonders as it was cursed by its temperamental moods. The damp and the early dark cast a great pall, and the melancholy that had seized me since New York did not lighten but only increased when I found Pitcairn’s telegram waiting for me at the Hotel Vancouver. I tucked it into my breast pocket and made dinner arrangements with Charles and Jean, then retired to my room, where I tore open the envelope. Norman, the editors have rejected the China idea. Bad luck. You’re on your own. Frank.

  The following morning the three of us gathered in the hotel lobby and took a cab to the port. Our luggage had gone off earlier that morning to the baggage master. I remember feeling a rush of excitement when the three great stacks of the Empress of Asia came into view. Gulls circled in and out of the clouds, dipping curiously like chaperones eager to glimpse the passengers they would accompany out to sea. In the excitement of the moment, the pure childlike thrill of standing before such an impressive vessel, I forgot the telegram and the succinct phrasing that so cleverly, so accurately, had let me know precisely what Pitcairn thought of me. You’re on your own.

  *

  Midnight brings a faint thunder of fighting from the east. There is a cool dampness in the air. November in Chang Yu, Hopei Province. I am carried up from a shallow sleep. Just now I rose from my cot and saw dull flashes of light illuminating the far-off hills. Someone is taking it in the teeth. We won’t know more for another day, maybe two. I believe my thoughts might have awakened me, if the fighting hadn’t.

  *

  There is some pleasure as well, but mostly it is mystery and hard work that goes into the remaking of a man’s life. I am finding that now. What I mean is that nothing I can say in these pages amounts to half or even a quarter of the truth as I knew it then. I’m talking about the actual experience of life. About the sound of crickets in August and the peace and wonder that fills your heart when you sit back and begin to accept the enormity of the world as it is presented to you when August comes and you feel the day and nature calling out to you. There is a full-on glory to this witnessing that only the greatest artists are able to capture. I will always believe I have seen the peasants working the great wheat harvests of Russia because I’ve read Anna Karenina, but I remind myself that Tolstoy is a once-in-a-century artist. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that the writing of a man’s life at least gives you an idea of just how special it all was to him the first time around.

  I recall standing on the deck of that magnificent ship, the Empress of Asia, and feeling the reality of what I was doing. I was leaving you. The full force of my decision came to me that morning as an almost physical pain. Much as I tried, I was unable to shake it off. But I also remember, as if possessed of two hearts, the serene joy of watching a flock of gulls darting among the ship’s three funnels high above the promenade deck and thinking I had now found my freedom. More gulls fluttered just off the stern, picking heels of bread from a girl’s hand. I imagined she was someone else, perhaps you, as you might appear at the age of eight or ten. She wore a blue wool coat and bonnet, and had beautiful blond curls. As she fed the birds, the woman I assumed was her mother held her by her freehand, careful not to let go as the girl leaned forward over the railing.

  The child’s delight was palpable. She shrieked with joy every time a gull took a piece of bread and lifted in the wind. The sun shone for most of the morning and this, too, raised my spirits somewhat. As the noon hour approached, clouds crossed over the ship, the last of the gulls folded their wings east, and it was then that remarkable columns of sunlight descended from above. This I took as a blessing upon us all, and every visible passenger seemed inspired by the spectacle of light spinning down through the clouds into the dark ocean, and by the thrill of having such a great steamer as the Empress underfoot, so solidly bearing us forth.

  After the girl in blue waved goodbye to the last of her gulls, my colleagues and I decided to take lunch at the promenade deck’s veranda café, situated at the ship’s stern. We ordered a generous plate of assorted sandwiches, and Dr. Parsons, himself a surgeon, thought it a grand idea to toast the commencement of our journey with a whiskey and soda. It being quite early, Miss Ewen and I shared a small pitcher of Pimms with lemon and cucumber. We watched the wide fan of the engine’s turbines bubble and spread far below us, and before two hours had passed we’d cleared the Juan de Fuca Strait. Vancouver Island faded in the distance and then the continent itself began to slip away—her coastline, her mountains—and finally we were ringed by what seemed an eternity of water. Our conversation that afternoon was generally enjoyable and full of optimism, but inwardly I was troubled by the weight of my leaving.

  I close my eyes now and recall the riches of that passage, the food, the cleanliness, the small troubles which from here seem so unimportant. What I remember is the gleam of silver tea sets, the potted palms and lilies that dotted the passageways, the pleasant light entering the tall, arched windows of the café where I took my breakfast most mornings. Now, cruelly, the aromas of the ship’s kitchens appear from nowhere, waking me with the false promise of braised lamb, fresh cheese, roasted garlic. The Empress boasted a luxury that seems happily ludicrous. She ran more quietly than my dreams are ever able to promise, prowled as they are by the groans of dying men and mortar fire.

  That first day, as we ate our lunch, I suggested to my colleagues that we indulge ourselves as best we could because the present conditions were sure not to last. The crossing to Hong Kong would take nineteen days. After that, I said, nothing was guaranteed. We should conserve our strength for the coming rigours. I planned to stay occupied during the crossing, intending to push certain gloomy thoughts aside while devoting myself to the preparations still pending. I would descend to the hold to check on our cargo, consisting of a fully equipped field hospital, complete the last of the background study I’d carried on board regarding matters of Chinese geography and politics, and send a number of telegrams ahead to Hong Kong and back to the China Aid Council in New York concerning various administrative points of interest. I also intended to seek confirmation that our man in Hong Kong would indeed meet us at the Ambassador Hotel, where we planned to stay briefly before our journey north to the mainland. As I outlined my itinerary, I noticed that Parsons had begun fidgeting. His eyes wandered. His glass was empty. He began tapping his fingers lightly on the tabletop, then raised his hand to call for the waitress.

  I had calculated that my tasks might consume only a fraction of my time on board, as I had set out with a more immediate interest at hand. I had intended to sit at this typewriter (much newer then) and collect my
thoughts for you, if one day you should care to read them. But the sea air failed to prove a sufficient inspiration for this first attempt, sincere though it was, for my heart felt on the point of bursting. Perhaps the sad reality of my departure tormented me more than I was aware. More than once I began this history, still unsure as to my deepest motives, for the truth comes—if at all—at its own stubborn pace. Stymied, I had no idea how to begin or what a man might say in circumstances such as mine. Where he might find the words.

  What did I discover? That I was as dishonest to myself at sea as I had always been on land. Troubled, I strolled the winter decks, consumed by misgiving.

  In my wandering I learned the ship’s plan, a welcome distraction. Her many sections and decks were connected by a vast series of passageways, stairs and promenades, but some of these—rectilinear as any ship’s plan is—were as narrow and confining as the medieval streets of a small European village. In certain sections she was quite cramped and claustrophobic, but those very same cramped passageways then opened suddenly to an airy lounge or plush dining hall or spacious reading room or bar every bit as ornate and charming as a town square in Seville or Siena. I carried my thoughts into each of these rooms and, in a state of introspection, watched the great ocean pass below. I circled her four continuous decks—shelter, upper, main and lower—all of which extended the full length of the ship, some 590 feet. I visited her cafés, restaurants and bars, her dining, reading and smoking rooms. I stood at the bow and wondered what I was headed into. At the stern I gazed back at what I’d left behind.